I recently participated in a conference for financial bloggers at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO. Kauffman, if you haven’t heard of it, is dedicated to the promotion of entrepreneurism and supports more economic research than any other foundation. It is a fabulous place and I really enjoyed the conference. For some reason they felt inclined to interview me, too. There are plenty more interviews to be seen at the Kauffman web site (interviews with really smart people, too, not just folks like me): Kauffman Conversations

49 Comments

Great interview Bob! You’ve got such good presence on camera and you speak well too. Interesting comments on the future of education and the role of entrepeneurs!

Jim
April 13, 2009 at 9:17 pm

A great interview, and the comments about the future of education were particularly provocative. With four kids in school, one about to graduate high school and enter college to pursue a Music Education degree, I don’t perceive that our current education administrators have any clue about the future described in the interview and I see this as an incredible opportunity for my daughter as she pursues her degree and plans for her future career.

Jerry
April 13, 2009 at 9:28 pm

Thanks for the interview, Bob. You shared several “columns” worth of thoughts right there!

Andrew
April 13, 2009 at 10:54 pm

Bob,

School for kids is not only for learning things. It’s an important social experience that contributes greatly to learning how to be a member of society, and how to relate to other people.

If all schooling was done by computer then kids would miss out on important opportunities to form relationships – both good and sometimes not so good – all important to being a healthy member of society.

Cris E
April 14, 2009 at 8:08 am

One reason online education can be better than physical schools is that much of the material isn’t that hard. If you can strip away the non-academic interference and let kids get their hands on the work, most of them can master it. For many students there’s a lot about the modern school that’s very difficult and has nothing to do with books: bullies, cliques, drugs, dating, unhealthy levels of competition, balancing work and studies, getting into a good high school or college and a bunch of other things I’ve managed to suppress over the years. If you can sweep it aside the work comes to the fore.

But for all the troubles of the old face-to-face world of cement and paper there was a lot of good in it that (so far) doesn’t really work in the online world. There’s a huge amount of socialization and public welfare work that goes on in school. I’d go so far as to say that this is becoming the primary role of schools these days as more and more things that used to be dealt with in other places get handled at school. (This isn’t just the student inoculations or teaching good and evil to kids that’s been going on forever. Think of school breakfast programs or mandatory community service hours, stuff that isn’t academic yet isn’t done outside of school.) It’s not a bad development, but it isn’t what schools were being asked to do decades ago. Anyway, learning how to work in groups or suppress the urge to say every stupid thing that enters your head or how to win gracefully or lose well or get cut from a team or ask a girl out might be possible to learn online, but there’s a lot more opportunity to practice these skills in a school with others than in front of a computer.

The thing is, these days education is about getting kids through adolescence to a point where they can be functional adults. There’s a lot about it that used to be bad or uncomfortable, but much of that won’t go away just because kids don’t have to be with other people anymore. Avoiding the world doesn’t give you the skills necessary to handle it. The bully that used to knock you down and scatter your books didn’t just evaporate online, he’s merely morphed into a sharp-typing avatar that can be just as terrible and much harder to drive off than in the old world. For every kid wandering the country in an RV with interested parents there are going to be a lot more odd geeks sitting alone in their rooms stomping the AP tests and demanding their accolades from an indifferent world that never got a chance to meet them. It happens all the time online, it has since back in the old BBS dial-up days 20 years ago and it’s a very significant issue for anyone who wants to move education in this direction. In fact, it’s probably the hardest part of moving education from groups to tools.

Jesse
April 19, 2009 at 8:15 am

I’m sorry, did Bob say people will spend their life online, and never socialise in person? No. Did he say he was an avid supporter of living life online? No. He said it’s inevitable. He said we need to start planning with that in mind. So, for example, planning how we can still get kids together to learn about winning, losing, working in groups. Sports for example. Or book club. I work online. I socialise. I expect Bob does the same. Why not similar for school kids? Why not do online what can be done better online, and yes, plan for group meetings and assingments where kids get together and meet up.

dai_vernon
April 13, 2009 at 11:51 pm

Hi Bob,

I gotta say I have been a fan for a long time, and I will echo everybody above me saying you were great in this interview. You say that you guess you’re a blogger but you’re a pretty good one, I must say.

I’ve been in college for about 2 years now and I am watching my brother go through the same high school I did. If I didn’t recognize the building, I would think he was on another planet, compared to the high school experience I had. The school has been a testbed of a lot of the half-brained things the district has been cooking up to present themselves as more modern. A trend I noticed is that their idea of how technology should mesh with education is as a way of holding people back to preserve the older education models that they are trying to hold on to. When I first got to university I was blown away by how much more modern and technology-embracing education could be.

I think that the doomsayers that talk about kids becoming completely divorced from their school experience by being so absorbed in their socially technological environment are going too far, but it definitely looks like the gap is widening. My girlfriend is in training to be a secondary-level science teacher and she says that the way she is taught to try and adapt to that kind of environment is just laughable. She thinks that teachers of adolescents will only be able to get a hold on their students by their own invented methods, because everybody above them are so far out of touch that it will be nearly impossible for them to even understand how they could do it.

“Too big to survive” is the most sane description of this current economy quagmire.

Tony
April 14, 2009 at 9:39 am

absolutely dead on. Whether business, education, or the social dynamic, upcoming clashes of new vs. old will be quite loud. Regarding our current crisis, a financial concept applies—the ‘workout’….and, this will be a good thing.

John
April 14, 2009 at 9:47 am

Personally I would prefer to see and hear a Mary Alyce interview. I imagine she has some great stories to share with Bob’s readers.

Good interview there Bob. I share your feelings about having a blog but not being a blogger. We stick to a once a week column on talkingfuture.com, similar to yourself so think of ourselves as self publishing columnists!

J Peters
April 15, 2009 at 7:10 am

Hopefully the Winne got to make a pit stop at Arthur Bryant’s for some serious good BBQ.

Vaughn Corden
April 15, 2009 at 12:06 pm

Loved your comments about education, Bob.

I’m a former ad guy, but today I’m a teacher. My technology background has made me the “Head of All Things Related to Computers” at my school and I, too, see what is coming. The ones I spend the most time training are my fellow teachers. I have first graders who can grasp relative versus absolute addressing in Excel better than most teachers! It’s no longer just the three ‘Rs, but three Rs and a T!

However, we’ll need the current crop of principals to all retire first…

Yes, I can echo the sentiments above. Like Bob I’m in my 50’s too and my kids are young. My son has been doing the URL trick and cavorting around web-sites like a pro but he doesn’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes. And this is the old “taking technology for granted” thing. In truth, I occasionally get overawed by technological advances. Kids know no fear tech-wise.

My kids haven’t known a time without home-based IT (in all it’s forms) so their perception of an educational future, their social development, is different from mine. I see the advantages of social interaction – if someone’s wearing a mask you can see that. As an avatar you can’t. Maybe other factors will come in to play as education online evolves from where we’re at now, and it won’t be so singular or isolated.

Excellent, thought-provoking piece Bob!

Badgerus Canadiensis
April 17, 2009 at 9:05 pm

Let me start by saying emphatically that I have enjoyed your work tremendously, and this interview is as thought provoking as your writings have been. One question I am left with, however, is how exactly you think anyone should or could plan for those things that come out of nowhere, the things that we are barely getting inklings of? Is it possible to plan for things we can’t imagine?

I’ve spent decades with technology, but not having Google Youtube, a mobile phone, and Wikipedia, etc., seems inconceivable.

Growth in the US is also complicated by the fact that anyone with a fast Internet connection is on fairly level pegging, and capital will flow to where entrepreneurs have a comparative advantage vis-à-vis government intervention and/or have little by way of legacy issues over labour and elderly plant to deal with. Thus China and the likes of Jim Rogers, for example.

And the Chinese can just as well study at Stanford, online, and stay in China.

Jesse
April 19, 2009 at 7:49 am

Your link to Kauffman Conversations seems to be broken. I’m using google chrome in case it’s not broken in other browsers.

Well put. I keep telling my parents that it’s very unlikely my kids (5&2) will be going away to college and they think I’m just crazy.

That higher education and the bridge from childhood to adulthood have been co-mingled is just an artifact of technology – that of having to send kids away to schools on wagons, trains, buses or cars to achieve an economically feasible concentration. That merger really doesn’t do a good job at either, so I expect as other models become viable the two will separate. Time to start building the lower-20’s no-frills-except-security apartment buildings in cities for the kids who have finished their education.

IkeaPimp
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